essomenic
by melignomon
Summary: "Essomenic: showing things as they will be in the future." Amy is tossed haphazardly through time; the Doctor is cryptic and unhelpful. To be fair, so is Amy. Part 2 of the fic-pair begun in "decutient". Amy/11


Note: So I promised I would have this one up on Wednesday at the latest - and I did, with almost an hour to spare! Whew. An exam and a minor meltdown, in conjunction with a solidly-packed schedule for the next week and a half, led to parts of this being a bit rushed. So make of that what you will. Also, I can't decide whether it's weird that I find it so much easier to write in the voice of a 900-year-old alien than the voice a human girl fairly close to my own age. Make of that what you will too, I guess. C'est la vie.

No spoilers in this one; no canon spoilers, anyway. Some timey-wimeyness, though. I can promise I'll do my level best to finish everything begun in this fic, and bring all the dangling elements full circle - if classes don't eat my life, that is.

This pics up where "decutient" leaves off.

(No, really, it does. Stick with it. I promise.)

Prompt: Essomenic - showing things as they will be in the future.

* * *

Amy runs.

Her lungs are screaming for air, her legs are burning with effort and exhaustion but she keeps running, because there's something terrible behind her that could crush her without noticing if she doesn't get out of its way, get somewhere safe. But she doesn't know where safety is, and she doesn't know if she's heading towards it, because the pitch-black trees are all exactly alike and she may be going around in endless circles, but there's no time to think of that, or think of anything. She's got to keep moving – someone told her that (but who?) – got to keep moving…

The ground is covered in cloud, so she doesn't see the twisting tree-root that catches her ankle and trips her. She lies sprawled on the ground, stunned, for one terrified breath; she can hear what's chasing her now, the footsteps so low and loud and massive that they're almost below the threshold of human hearing. She tries to get back on her feet, but the ground below the cloud cover is slick with dew and she slips, crashing back down. There's a sudden burst of pain as her hand hits the edge of some sort of sharp rock.

She tries again to stand up, hearing the massive footsteps getting nearer all the time, and nearly falls again – but as soon as she pulls her injured hand above the cloud cover another hand reaches down and grabs it, ignoring the blood beginning to seep from the cut, and Amy looks up into the haggard smile of her Doctor.

He pulls her to her feet and forward, further into the trees, shouting "Come on, Pond!" as she half-stumbles along behind him. Her hand is stinging in his grip, her ankle is beginning to throb now too where it was caught by the root, but there's something else – something in her head, something twisted and strange. But there's no time for that, because the Doctor is picking up speed, and Amy falls into the rhythm of running with the ease of long practice, matching her stride to his.

"What is that thing, Doctor?" she shouts, as the beast behind them gives a weird, oscillating roar.

"Essomene!" the Doctor pants. "Time-creatures, quantum dinosaurs, all sort of stretched out and half-real in temporal space –"

"Seems a bit more than half real to me!" Amy snaps, as the forest fills with the creaking groan of a tree being pushed aside, and the almighty snap and crash as it falls.

"Yeah, well, this one's upset – they're not particularly fond of me!"

"What did you do to them?" Amy demands, tugging on the Doctor's hand to steady him as a hidden tree-root snags at his feet as well. He stumbles but recovers, then suddenly veers into the trees to their left, pulling her alongside. A burst of color blooms ahead of them, an impossibly tangled thicket of glittering blue flowers. The Doctor shoves Amy into a gap near the roots before wriggling in himself.

"I didn't do anything to them," he manages between gasps for breath. "At least, I haven't yet, but I will – I'll commit some sort of terrible crime here in a few centuries' time, and the Essomenes are the worst sort of sticklers, they believe in pre-emptive punishment –" the creature roars again, and the Doctor swallows the rest of his sentence, waiting for the noise to stop. It goes on an on, far beyond what a normal animal, even a large one, should be able to sustain.

Finally it dies down, and in the unnatural silence Amy finds herself almost whispering. "But that's not fair! If you haven't done it yet how do they know you will? Can't time be rewritten, or can't you do some sort of time-loopy thing, or something –"

"The Essomenes are quantum-space creatures, they live all sort of strung out along their own timelines," the Doctor says. His words are muffled by flowers as he cranes away from her, peering out to see if he can catch a glimpse of the creature. The whole forest is silent now, even the ground-shaking sound of the monster's feet. "There's a part of them alive at every second of their lifetimes, all with the same brain," he continues. "All the separate events of their existence are happening in the same second for them, the second that goes on forever. Rubbish way to have your brain set up," he adds, almost as an afterthought. "Knowing every single thing that's going to happen in your life whether or not it's actually happened yet. I hate spoilers, they take the fun out of everything."

Amy starts to reply, but she's stopped by a tugging at her hair. A handful of red strands have caught on a thorn in the flower-thicket above her, and they're being pulled as the thicket rises, impossibly, incredibly, into the air, leaving the girl and the Time Lord underneath completely exposed.

The Essomene stands above them, holding a mass of flowers the size of a car in its teeth. It tosses the thicket away, and listens as it lands with a _crunch _somewhere in the distant canopy.

The creature is _enormous_.

Of course Amy had known it was big - it shakes the ground when it walks, and shoulders gigantic trees aside like she would brush through tall grass - but none of the sounds it made could have prepared her for just how colossally, impossibly huge it actually is. She and the Doctor, as they shakily climb to their feet, stand just about as tall as the top of its hoof, which is split down the middle and looks like it's made of weathered gray stone. Her eyes follow the hoof upwards, as though in a daze; she takes in the six spindly stone legs, the huge expanse of its belly and back, the arching neck, and perched precariously atop it the wedge-shaped head, at least the size of a small house. Its mouth is open, revealing rows of literal tombstone teeth, and huge granite antlers sweep back from the crown of its skull, puncturing the forest canopy far above.

It sways slightly, just standing there, and Amy would say it's staring down at them, except for the fact that it doesn't have eyes. Instead, the front of its head is taken up by some sort of weird lens that glistens like rose quartz and is marked with strange symbols that hurt her eyes. It looks like a clock – like a gigantic, living, alien clock, and it is surveying them with what Amy can only guess is a sort of cold curiousity.

"Right, Amy," the Doctor says softly, as the Essomene grunts like a massive deer and Amy waits for some sort of brilliant plan, some sort of day-saving stroke of genius. "_Run!_"

She turns toward the Doctor, ready to grab his hand and run. But suddenly everything has stopped moving, and as she looks at the Doctor, his face splinters like a smashed stained glass portrait and the whole world sort of melts and shivers and _twists_ and -

* * *

- she's sitting on the swing under the grate in the TARDIS console room.

"Doctor!" she cries, leaping to her feet, but there's no answer, the Doctor is nowhere around, he could have been trampled by the Essomene, or teleported her (_that would be_ so _like him_, she fumes), or anything at all; she has no idea, but she's damned if she isn't going to find out. "Doctor!" she shouts again, pounding up the stairs to the console, but just as she reaches it there's a deafening roar like all the air rushing out of the room, and out of the corner of her eye she sees something blazing among the buttons and pinwheels of the ship's controls.

It's a crack, ugly and jagged and burning, and even as it closes, smoke is curling out from the central column, and before she can make it to the stairs there's the much more normal roar of an explosion, and the room is full of fire and -

* * *

- the force of the explosion sends her stumbling into a glass wall, but suddenly there is no explosion, no TARDIS, only a long corridor walled and floored with glass on every side. She leans against the wall for a moment, struggling to get her breath back, then risks a look around. There's no fire, no crack, no closing portal or weird teleportation device – just an empty corridor. Nothing more, nothing less. Through one of the clear walls she can see out, to a system of metal walkways suspended under a sunset sky.

"All right, Doctor," she says loudly. "I don't know what you think you're doing, but it isn't funny, so _cut it out_!" There's no answer, which is more than a bit disappointing, though not unexpected. Probably not a joke of the Doctor's, then – not that she really thought it would be. He doesn't seem the type for practical jokes. He's far too fond of talking; he couldn't keep his mouth shut long enough for the trap to spring.

Far down the corridor she can see a door gleaming diamond and silver, and she sets off toward it, determined to find _someone _who can tell her why the world keeps going wonky on her.

As she arrives at that thought her head begins to ache with a queer sort of pressure, like something is bent out of shape at the base of her skull and it's pulling on everything else. There's a _wrongness _to this place, she shouldn't be here – not now – but _why_? What _happened_?

She doesn't know. There were trees, and apples (_apples_? What the hell have apples got to do with anything?) and the Doctor was there, but he was upset – frightened - his face white and drawn above her in the gloom, his hands framing her face like he only ever does when she's in some sort of terrible danger, and he was talking, saying something important but speaking so fast, his voice sounded so far away, she couldn't hear…

She blinks, shakes her head like waking up from a dream, and finds that she's been standing stupidly, not moving, for a least a minute. She shudders, a wave of dizziness and _wrongness_ washing over her for a moment, but then it passes and she turns her attention to the door. It's locked, with a huge ornate twisty lock-looking thing, but the first knob she tries comes away in her hands. The door swings open easily, and she steps out into another corridor.

Someone comes around the corner at a flat run and crashes into her, all but knocking her to the floor. "Hey, watch it!" she shouts, and is about to say a lot more, but the half-formed tirade dies on her lips as she stares up into the Doctor's face.

He's wearing gigantic purple glasses, and looks just as shocked and bewildered as she feels, but she doesn't care about any of that as she lurches forward and wraps her arms around him. "Where the hell have you been?" she asks, her voice muffled by his jacket – a different jacket than the one he was wearing a few minutes ago, all dark and swirly-patterned, but she doesn't care about that either. He's allowed a costume change now and then.

"Amy?" he murmurs, and something in his voice makes her pull away and look at him properly. He's squinting at her with unsettling intensity, his eyes entirely too solemn and grave behind those goofy party-favor glasses, and he's got that look he gets when he's scented an impossible puzzle and seems to be doing his level best to stare it into submission. Amy can feel her own brow furrowing in sympathy as she squints back at him.

"Doctor, what –"

She can practically see the lightning bolt of inspiration jolt through him before she's even finished the question. "Right – right!" he crows, and pulls her close again, muttering into her ear. "Amy, mad impossible Amy, you've been brilliant, but we've only got seconds – there's going to be a red sort of rocket-shaped thing, a flare launcher, with a big blue button on the side – you've got to press that button, it might be the most important thing you ever do. Remember, remember – red rocket, blue button. And when you're done, put the rocket where I can reach it – that's important, too."

"Doctor, why?" Amy demands. She's beginning to feel strange again, like the edges of everything are shivering around her, and from the way the Doctor is looking at her she's guessing not even he can keep her here. She feels the _change _start pulling at her and she steps forward, against it, curling her nails into the Doctor's sleeve and holding on like a vise. "What's going on?" she demands, and her voice comes out sounding harsher than she meant it to, but the Doctor doesn't seem to have noticed.

"I'll explain it to you later – well, I already have. That is to say, I will have." He stares searchingly into her eyes for a long moment, then sighs "Good luck," and leans in to kiss her – not on the forehead, like he usually does, but on the cheek. There's something else different about it too, something about the way he half-consciously pulls her closer as his lips touch her skin, and Amy is half a second away from grabbing his bow tie and showing him a _real_ kiss when -

* * *

- bright white sunlight shines into her eyes, blinding her, and a hot wind scrapes across her exposed skin like sandpaper. She had been leaning on the Doctor but the Doctor is gone, and she overbalances at once, falling to her knees. She's expecting pain as she slams into the glass floor but instead feels only stinging heat as she sinks into – sand?

Not sand, she realizes as she blinks the painful afterimages of light from her eyes. She's fallen into some sort of dust, copper-colored and too fine-grained to be sand. It clings to her as she stands, refusing to be brushed off, and after a few moments she leaves off trying. There's no corridor this time, no doors, only copper dust stretching out in every direction to the horizon, where it meets a sky the color of verdigris. The only break in the monotony of the scenery is a jumble of white stones not far away, and Amy makes a beeline for them. As she walks, she lifts her hand without realizing it, pressing her fingers to the spot where the Doctor's kiss still burns on her cheek.

The stones are huge, white, and hexagonal, and seem to have been scattered around by some kind of blast. Amy scrambles over the first cluster of them and starts searching around for anything that might have a blue button on it; no luck. Ahead of her is a slight rise crowned by a further line of stones, and as she pulls herself over the top she catches a glimpse of what lies on the other side, and cries out in horror.

Below her, stretched out in the dust like a dead man, is the Doctor.

Amy all but falls down the slope in her hurry to reach him, and it's only once she's dropped to her knees beside him that she registers the scorch marks and soot that have turned his normally-pristine clothes into a raggedy patchwork. There's a streak of dried blood concealing a deep gash over one eye, and various other flecks and stains of blood all down one side of him, some of it human-looking and some of it bright blue. One of his hands is thrown out in front of him, as though he was reaching for something when he fell, and Amy grasps it gently, prying his fingers apart so she can twine them with hers. It's only when she sees his hand trembling in her grip that she realizes she's shaking.

"Doctor," she whispers, as though they were back on the TARDIS, and she'd crept up on him lying on his back on the floor of the console room and was trying to see whether he was awake or asleep. "Doctor, what's happened to you?"

"Amy Pond," he croaks, his eyes fluttering open, and Amy's heart stops. By the time it starts up again, a beat or two later, the Doctor has gone, sunk back into unconsciousness; but this time she's paying attention and she can see his breathing, the gentle pull and relax of one red brace (the other, she notes distantly, has snapped). She reaches out and smooths the hair back from his face with her free hand, her thumb stroking gently over the cut on his forehead. Maybe her touch wakes him up again, maybe he isn't as unconscious as she thought, because his eyes don't open but his hand moves ever-so-slightly in hers, his fingers motioning away, in the direction he must have been moving when he fell.

Amy manages to tear her eyes from his face long enough to look where he wants her to, and sees only a blur of copper and white. She wipes away the tears that are clouding her vision and looks again. The red rocket-looking thing is lying there, barely visible in the shadow of a propped-up stone.

Amy takes a deep, steadying breath, then stands, dropping the Doctor's hand and making her way over to the mysterious thing. It's half-buried in drifted copper dust, and it seems to have gotten stuck somehow under the stone, but after a few minutes of digging and struggling she manages to get it out. It's about the size and rough shape of a model submarine, and there's a big blue button as wide across as her thumb on one side.

"The most important thing you'll ever do," she murmurs to herself, disbelieving. But she points the thing (_flare launcher_, she remembers) straight up into the sky and hits the button, watching as a brilliant red flare bursts from the tip and arcs up into the sky. It hits the top of its trajectory and hangs there, pulsing and throwing off curtains of light like a small, unstable sun.

Everything is starting to slow down and get wobbly again, so Amy quickly crosses back to the Doctor and drops the empty flare launcher beside him, inches from his outstretched hand. She has just enough time to bend down and touch his cheek, in almost the same spot where he kissed her, before -

* * *

- she wakes up to the distant sound of birds.

Her head aches abominably, like something structurally important has been wrenched out of her skull with rusty pliers, and there's a sharp, insistent throbbing in the palm of one hand, but nothing seems to be broken and if any limbs are missing, at least they aren't putting up a fuss about it. She can feel something rough and gnarled scraping her back, and something fuzzy brushing the tip of her nose, but that doesn't tell her anything about where she is this time, or why.

There's nothing for it. She swallows the dread and bile rising in her throat, and opens her eyes.

The fuzzy thing turns out to have been a huge purple leaf, growing from a vine that droops to just above her head before trailing back up into gloom. She brushes it away with her uninjured hand, and finds herself staring up through thinly crosshatched branches at a solid scarlet sky, with stars so bright they look like holes punched through it, spilling fire.

Memory returns in a rush. "Doctor," she calls softly, thinking he might be hiding from the Essomene nearby. She is astonished by how weak and raspy her own voice sounds in her ears. There's no reply except the soft rustle of the canopy and the distant wittering call of the lightning-birds.

She tries to move, to roll into a better position and maybe get down, but is forced to stop with a groan as every muscle starts burning in protest. She's trying to decide whether just rolling out of her encircling branches and crashing to the ground might hurt less than trying to climb, when a shout rings out from below: "Hey! Are you awake up there?"

"Yeah, I'm here!" Amy calls back, realizing as soon as the words leave her mouth that that wasn't the Doctor's voice. Too late now – she can hear the racket as whoever it is starts climbing, and within five minutes her would-be rescuer shoves a cluster of leaves aside and crawls out onto the nearest branch, pulling a twig from her long red hair. "He doesn't take us to enough _indoor_ wonders of the universe, does he?" the newcomer asks, smirking.

Amy stares for a long moment, then closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and looks again. Nothing has changed; she's still looking at a young woman, early twenties maybe, long ginger hair and long legs, a pale pretty face, dressed in a completely inappropriate (but gorgeous) outfit. "Okay, I get it," she says, beginning to feel her way past the initial shock. "You're a time traveller, should have expected this. Come back in time, meet yourself, it was bound to happen at some point. No big deal. Right. You," she says to her doppleganger, "are going to tell me what the _hell's_ been going on."

"That's what I'm here for," the other Amy agrees, sounding improbably cheerful. "Well, that and to get you down to the ground. The Doctor'll be by in a few minutes, and I've got to be there to meet him or else the universe explodes." She edges along the branch until she's close enough to start shifting vines and branches around, clearing out some of the tangle that's hedging Amy in.

Amy raises an eyebrow. "What, really? The whole universe depends on gettin' me out of a tree?"

The other Amy rolls her eyes. "Well, you try translating 'temporal-recursative-critical function failure' into normal English and let me know what you come up with. Move to the left a bit," she orders, and Amy complies. The pressure of a branch pinning her arm to her side is suddenly gone, and she's able to stretch muscles that cramp and complain as though they've been trapped for hours. That's weird – didn't she lose the Doctor just a few minutes ago? It doesn't feel like it's been that long…

"When I asked him what _that _meant," her other self went on, drawing her attention again, "all he would say was not to exceed the Blinovitch limitation. Which would be great, if he bothered to tell me what the Blinovitch limitation _is_. I swear, sometimes I just wish he wasn't so, so…"

"…Doctor-ish," they say together, with the same voice and an identical half-shrug of affectionate frustration. Amy pauses, staring at her other self with the sudden conviction that it's her – every bit as her as she is. Really, really her. The sensation sends a shiver down her spine.

"Okay, this is kind of weird," she says slowly, and is relieved when her other self nods emphatically. "How long's it been? For you, I mean. Weeks, months…?" She gives her future self a quick once-over; no obvious differences, no fingers missing or anything (also, she notices, no rings on any of the fingers drumming against a nearby branch). No visible scars.

"I don't know exactly," her other self confesses. "It's kind of hard to tell, on the TARDIS – I mean, you know. It's been a while, though, I think. There's been…stuff happening." She glances away, suddenly unsure, and leaves off drumming on the branch to twirl a stray lock of hair between her fingers. She's hiding a secret, or possibly several; gigantic secrets, life-changing ones – _spoilers_, the Doctor's voice scolds in the back of her mind –

She's about to demand to be told, spoilers be damned, but before she can manage the question she's swamped by a wave of dizziness and _wrongness_ that makes her wobble dangerously and nearly sends her plumeting to the ground far below. "It's happening again," she gasps. "It's changing –"

"No, that's all over, you're well out of it now," her other self says reassuringly. She's moved forward, her hand outstretched, but stops just short of touching Amy's shoulder – like she can't, like something is holding her back.

"What's all over?" Amy asks, feeling around her for something to lean on. The dizziness has subsided a bit now, but she can feel another wave building, and suddenly everything's gone cold and strange. "W-whats happening to me?"

"It's the time sickness," her other self says. "You've been travelling into the future, ever since the apple-thing bit you. That's what their poison does, it sort of bounces you all around time. But humans aren't supposed to time-travel without some kind of ship, that's why you're feeling so awful. The Doctor would have come back to help himself, but if he came back here at all the big clock-things would know."

"Some excuse," Amy groans. The dizziness is back again, accompanied by a surge of nausea this time. It's like a weird sort of flu, or an incredibly vicious hangover –

"But it's not as bad as that time in Cardiff, remember? At Aunt Sharon's friend's wedding?" Her other self is smiling, trying to be encouraging, and Amy rolls her eyes because she's always been sort of rubbish at comforting sick people. "All right, yes, I know, but we've really _got _to keep moving," her other self says. "You absolutely have to be on the ground when you're supposed to be, and the Doctor said I'd only have five minutes – God knows how long that actually translates to." She pulls back a cluster of vines by her feet, clearing a pathway for Amy to slide down. Any movement at all seems like an impossible challenge, but Amy manages it, moving slowly and clutching at the branches around her every few minutes when the dizziness gets to be overwhelming.

Getting up into the canopy was easy, but with the time-sickness punishing her every move with pain and nausea, getting back down is a much trickier business. Alone, it would have been completely impossible. Amy is so focused on the basic movements, just putting one foot below the other without losing her grip on the branches, that they've nearly reached the bottom before something her other self said begins gnawing at the back of her mind.

They stop to rest on a low tree-limb, and Amy collapses gratefully against the trunk, struggling to get her breath back. The world is still spinning, but closing her eyes helps a little, and the worst edge of the nausea is starting to subside.

"Well, then," her other self says, after a moment of silence. "Aren't you going to ask me what happened?"

"I was thinking about it," Amy answers. She risks opening her eyes again, and finds that the dizziness is much more bearable now, and also that her other self is staring at her very hard, though not without a hint of a smile. "All right, fine," she sighs. "What happens? In that desert, with the big white stones, the Doctor – he was – I mean, does he –" the words die in her throat, and a sudden chill sweeps through her that has nothing to do with the time-sickness. "He's fine, right? That's why you're here, because the Doctor was fine and he sent you back?"

Her other self looks away, up into the canopy. She starts swinging her feet back and forth, like a child lost in a difficult thought (_Blimey, I didn't realize how _fidgety _I am all the time,_ Amy thinks). "'Fine' isn't exactly the right word," her other self says, hesitantly. "The thing you've got to realize about the Doctor is –"

Amy doesn't get to find out what she has to realize, because her other self's voice dissolves into a weird crackle of static that can't possibly come from a human mouth. A split-second later her whole body flickers, like an image on a TV screen losing reception. She comes back solid, but puts one hand to her head and shudders. "Ugh, I have got to get him to do something about that," she grumbles, then shakes it off and turns to Amy. "Look, I'm sure I'll be pulled back any second now, so –" she points off into the forest. "TARDIS is that way, start running when you hear Ol' Clockface behind you and the Doctor will be along in a second. You'll have to do this part twice, but after that you're back on track." She wavers, flickers, reappears. "Oh, and about your other question," she says, leaning in to all but whisper in Amy's ear, "the answer is _yes_."

"Yes to what?" Amy demands, but her other self is already growing grainy, then transparent, and then she's gone altogether - or almost. Her conspiratorial grin, like the Cheshire Cat's, hangs in the air for a fraction of a second; then it, too, is gone. "Typical," Amy sighs. "Never learn anything from time travel. What's the point of it if you won't even help yourself out?"

She waits a moment to make sure her other self is really gone, and then starts easing gingerly down to the next branch, and from there it's only a short drop to the cloudy forest floor. Landing awkwardly, she stumbles, and fetches up against a nearby tree-trunk.

Only then does she stop to think about what her 'other question' would have been. If her other self hadn't vanished, if she had had more time to talk to Amy From the Future, with all her future-knowledge, what else would she have asked…? _Yes to what?_

Almost without realizing it, she presses her fingertips to the spot where she can almost feel the Doctor's kiss still burning on her cheek.

That kiss, which had been so sweet and so very like him but also so _different_, as if there was something different between them – something different in the way he saw her, the way he touched her, something in the future that had changed the way they reacted to each other beyond all recognition. She _knew _the Doctor's you've-done-brilliantly or I'm-so-glad-you're-alive kisses, and that hadn't been one of them.

Then what could it have been? What had happened, will happen, to change it like that?

"_The answer is _yes." _Fat lot of help that is._

A faint tremor in the ground shakes her out of her reverie, and she sets off in the direction of the TARDIS, moving slowly at first, but feeling less wretched with every step. She hasn't gone far when the tremors turn to actual small quakes, and she can hear the huge _whump _of the Essomene's footsteps echoing somewhere behind her. At least, she thinks it's behind her – there's no easy way to tell in the uniform gloom of the forest.

The footsteps grow louder, closer, and she starts running.

Her lungs are screaming for air, her legs are burning with effort and exhaustion but she keeps running, because she isn't sure the Essomene is chasing her but she is sure that it could crush her without noticing if she doesn't get out of its way, get somewhere safe. But she doesn't quite know where the TARDIS is, and she doesn't know if she's still heading towards it, because the rows of pitch-black trees are all exactly alike and she may be going around in endless circles, but there's no time to think of that, or think of anything. She's got to keep moving –

Under the cloud cover, she doesn't see the twisting tree-root that catches her ankle and trips her. She lies sprawled on the ground, stunned, for one terrified breath; she can hear the Essomene much more clearly now, the footsteps so low and loud and massive that they're almost below the threshold of human hearing. She tries to get back on her feet, but the ground is slick with dew and she slips, crashing back down. There's a sudden burst of pain as her hand hits the edge of some sort of sharp rock, that digs into the bite already there.

She tries again to stand up, hearing the massive footsteps getting nearer all the time, and nearly falls again – but as soon as she pulls her injured hand above the cloud cover another hand reaches down and grabs it, ignoring the blood beginning to seep from the cut, and Amy looks up into the haggard smile of her Doctor.

* * *

Fin.

(Or, well, the beginning, I guess. Depending on your point of view.)

Reviews are greatly appreciated - let me know if you did or didn't understand at all what I was getting at in this one, if I laid the timey-wimey on too thick, if the coming-full-circle worked at all. Anything and everything. All reviews help improve my writing for future installments. Thanks as always to those kind and lovely people who have reviewed my other stories!


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